Freeze Status

[Aeroblast]

Freeze is a status condition that makes your Pokemon unable to attack until it thaws - Pokemon has 20% chance of thawing every time it tries to attack. There are also other conditions that thaw the said Pokemon, such as using Fire moves on it (or the said Pokemon uses a certain move that thaws itself).

What's deadly about the Freeze status is that the frozen Pokemon may never have a chance to move if you're unlucky enough to be with it. However, there is a major drawback to Freeze status, as there's no reliable way to inflict this status as the highest chance of inflicting Freeze status with a move is Secret Power (30%), which is rarely used competitively, if ever. Most other moves that inflict Freeze status only have 10% chance of of freezing. There's also no move that directly inflicts Freeze status.

Question is, If there is a move available in the future that makes it more reliable to inflict a Freeze status on a Pokemon (i.e. Flash Freeze that has some 70-80% percent of freezing a Pokemon), do you think Freeze would be a viable status to use? Would it be too overpowered? Discuss away.

 

[Nah]

Hmm, that is interesting. I think that if a reliable freeze inducing move is released (on non-crappy Pokemon), it'll probably end up like sleep. There'd be a "Freeze Clause" similar to Sleep Clause. Because Freeze is a lot like Sleep: it renders your Pokemon useless for a somewhat random amount of time (although there is Sleep Talk).

 

[Brane]

As Zekrom said, I think Sleep would still be the preferred option. Not only because it's more reliable and easily accessible, but there aren't many Ice-type Pokemon that could utilise the move without giving up a valuable move slot.

I heavily doubt they'd also make a damaging move with something like 70-80% likelihood. The highest you would get would probably be 30%. It'd be a different story if it was simply a status move itself.

Being frozen is more of an annoyance and not really a viable strategy imo. It would need some supporting moves alongside it like a version of Dream Eater.

But it could be interesting if it was a status move that inflicted damage every turn it was frozen, that would be able to make some of the defensive ice-types slightly better.